It's Still Life

1 of 27: Veilwake
(Six sentences. One soul. A Colour once felt, not seen. A shard of the First Colour: Veilwake.)

1 of 27: Veilwake

Felreil walks where no wind speaks, and none dare follow, across a lunar-dry flatland that once dreamed of being sea but woke as salt-cracked stone—and when the black cloud drags its shadow across his path like a bruise across bone, he stops and listens (…not out of fear, but recognition), because sometimes thunder is only thunder, and sometimes it’s the Earth remembering how to shatter.

The hut is too small for the sky above it, tin roof blistered, rust crept down like dried blood from its seams, and inside, the man lies dying—not from one thing but from all things—as the woman reads from a book that names no gods and promises no salvation, only the comfort of a story shaped like a circle, smooth as stones that have survived a river.

He asks for water, the woman says nothing (she gave him the last of it days ago, just so he could dream of drinking again), and her voice is raw from reading aloud, but she keeps going—because if she stops, she’ll hear the silence, and if she hears the silence, she’ll remember the sound of him not breathing.

Felreil steps inside, and the air folds around him like it’s known him forever; the woman does not flinch—she only turns the page, as if he’s always been part of her story—she knew he was coming, the way you know a shadow is yours even when the light comes from nowhere.

He doesn’t offer water; he lays a hand on the old man’s chest and says, “Listen, old one,” and the man does—hears the breath between his own breaths stretch wide as sky, and in that space, forgets thirst.

The woman keeps reading, though the words have gone translucent now—older than paper, softer than sorrow, time’s own lease—and when the man exhales his last, it leaves him not as silence but as a syllable—the kind that moths carry on wings—and outside, the tin roof hums a note no one ever taught it to sing: a sound that stays behind, like a name the sky once knew—the sound of the first unnamed colour Veilwake .

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If you haven’t read the Prologue (or Before) post, it’s useful in understanding this series.

Previous Instalments – To access all of the instalments on one page, please use this link

Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “Lease”.  Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Images are copyright and not to used without permission, which I willingly give when asked, and when not for commercial use. Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2025.